Review: Room
Room is a book I’d been wanting to read (and slightly dreading reading) for several years. I first read about it in a New York Times book review in the fall of 2010 and made a mental note to add it to my list. I even gifted it—to my mom and my sister—without having read it myself. They both read and loved it, but I kept putting it off until last week, when my recent string of melancholy reads (A Little Life, Dept of Speculation, My Name is Lucy Barton—review forthcoming) inspired me to add another clear heartbreaker to the list.
The funny thing, though, was that I kept expecting Room to break my heart, and it didn’t—quite.
Before you write me off as heartless, let’s do a quick recap. If you haven’t read any of Room’s reviews—either of the novel or of the 2016 film that earned Brie Larson an Oscar—then you’ll understand my reticence to begin the emotional work of this particular reading journey. It’s no spoiler to say that the titular room in which the first half of the book takes place is no ordinary chamber; rather, it’s a prison in which the narrator, five-year-old Jack, and his mother, called simply “Ma,” are being held against their (or, at least, against Ma’s) will. Their jailer, who has never actually seen Jack (Ma hides Jack in the wardrobe whenever he enters the room), makes near-nightly unwanted visits to Ma. It quickly becomes clear that Ma has been kept in the room for seven years, and that her captor fathered Jack by force.
These horrific elements alone would lead a reasonable reader to believe that this would be a traumatic read. And it might have been, if Emma Donoghue had chosen Ma to narrate her story. Instead, though, Jack is the narrator, and he’s a charming, loveable, impressive, and—weirdly—very reliable one. The book is shockingly sweet—the first few chapters set a perfect scene as Jack describes in impeccable detail his environment and routines. Jack’s five-year-old vernacular runs and tumbles, just as he does in his 11x11 surroundings. His details—of the games he and Ma play, the foods they eat, the chores they do—are both charming and impressive, offering a window into the incredible parenting Ma has done in spite of the odds against her and a glimpse of a happy, relatively normal little boy who doesn’t know what he’s missing outside of Room and who, at his core, loves his mother and the only home he knows. Jack doesn’t particularly like the man who has imprisoned them, whom he calls “Old Nick,” but his dislike is secondhand; he senses that Ma doesn’t like Old Nick, and Jack doesn’t like it when Ma is unhappy. For the most part, Jack only catches glimpses of Old Nick through the wardrobe’s keyhole, and this limited perspective makes the man—whom we know is a monster—more two-dimensional, somewhat like a TV villain. Even the horrible abuse Ma routinely faces is muted for the reader and Jack, who unwittingly alludes to it by recounting how he counts the squeaks of the bed before Old Nick falls asleep. Ma's bravery protects her son, and it protects us, too.
Jack feels safe in Room, and that revelation is both sweet and stifling. His copious details and reluctance to change his routines also show the world-weary reader just how confined Ma is. The first few hundred pages hint darkly at claustrophobia and even border on boredom—if the novel continued with Jack’s chirpy narration of his and Ma’s 121-square-foot life, we would probably lose interest.
It doesn’t, though, and we don’t; to include a half-hearted spoiler, the novel does part with Room, and Jack and Ma eventually enter the world—Ma to places and people, including herself, that have changed immeasurably in seven years, and Jack to a place he had spent his five years believing only existed on television.
Interestingly, it is the reentry into the world that is the most traumatic. The initial relief, the first breath of fresh air, is fleeting—Ma must recalibrate and become a mother who is still devoted to her child when he is not the only person she loves in her life. It is difficult for both of them; it is clear that Jack misses Room and is overwhelmed by his new life. At one point, a nurse asks Jack if he’s homesick, and the question upsets Ma, even though it is quite clear to the reader that Jack is homesick. Ma is never homesick for Room—she always hated it and has a negative, visceral reaction when she thinks of it after she is freed. For Ma, Room represented trauma and captivity; for Jack, it represented home and safety and love. Like Ma, we are influenced by the real world, and we feel as claustrophobic and panicked as she does when Jack indicates that he would choose a life of confinement with Ma over a life in the world. When Ma lived in Room, Jack was her only key to the outside world—a breath of fresh air, the only thing keeping her sane. Outside of Room, though, he is an alien, and he is suffocating her. The love is still there, but navigating it amid boundless terrain is unfamiliar.
What most shocked me as I leafed through Room’s engrossing pages was that though the book was plenty traumatic and exhausting, the physical trauma was not the most traumatic part of Ma’s story. Rather, it was her fear, her guilt, her uncertainty, her difficult reintegration into the world, and her altered relationship with a son who never does anything but love her that was the most difficult to read.
In the end, though, that love is sustaining, for both Ma and Jack. The novel is less about physical abuse and more about resilience, love, grit, and joy—and both Ma and Jack find that, even in the smallest and saddest of spaces, in spades.
Boston Bookworm Review: 5/5
